Amy Lowell Quotes
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When I go away from you The world beats dead Like a slackened drum.
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Without poetry the soul and heart of man starves and dies.
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My! ain't men blinder'n moles?
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I know that a creed is the shell of a lie.
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There are few things so futile, and few so amusing, As a peaceful and purposeless sort of perusing Of old random jottings set down in a blank book You've unearthed from a drawer as you looked for your bank book.
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Lilacs, False Blue, White, Purple, Colour of lilac, Your great puffs of flowers Are everywhere in this my New England ... Lilacs in dooryards Holding quiet conversation with an early moon; Lilacs watching a deserted house; ... Lilacs, wind-beaten, staggering under a lopsided shock of bloom, You are everywhere.
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Don’t ask a writer what he’s working on. It’s like asking someone with cancer on the progress of his disease.
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Only those of our poets who kept solidly to the Shakespearean tradition achieved any measure of success. But Keats was the last great exponent of that tradition, and we all know how thin, how lacking in charm, the copies of Keats have become.
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Great emotion always tends to become rhythmic, and out of that tendency the forms of art have been evolved. Art becomes artificial only when the forms take precedence over the emotion.
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I ask but one thing of you, only one, That always you will be my dream of you; That never shall I wake to find untrue All this I have believed and rested on, Forever vanished, like a vision gone Out into the night. Alas, how few There are who strike in us a chord we knew Existed, but so seldom heard its tone We tremble at the half-forgotten sound. The world is full of rude awakenings And heaven-born castles shattered to the ground, Yet still our human longing vainly clings To a belief in beauty through all wrongs. O stay your hand, and leave my heart its songs!
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The stigma of oddness is the price a myopic world always exacts of genius.
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May is much sunshine through small leaves.
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Let us be of cheer, remembering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never come.
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I do not suppose that anyone not a poet can realize the agony of creating a poem. Every nerve, even every muscle, seems strained to the breaking point. The poem will not be denied; to refuse to write it would be a greater torture. It tears its way out of the brain, splintering and breaking its passage, and leaves that organ in the state of a jelly-fish when the task is done.
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Life is a stream On which we strew Petal by petal the flower of our heart; The end lost in dream, They float past our view, We only watch their glad, early start. Freighted with hope, Crimsoned with joy, We scatter the leaves of our opening rose; Their widening scope, Their distant employ, We never shall know. And the stream as it flows Sweeps them away, Each one is gone Ever beyond into infinite ways. We alone stay While years hurry on, The flower fared forth, though its fragrance still stays.
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Time! Joyless emblem of the greed of millions, robber of the best which earth can give.
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Take everything easy and quit dreaming and brooding and you will be well guarded from a thousand evils.
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My heart is tuned to sorrow, and the strings Vibrate most readily to minor chords, Searching and sad; my mind is stuffed with words Which voice the passion and the ache of things: Illusions beating with their baffled wings Against the walls of circumstance.
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My words are little jars For you to take and put upon a shelf. Their shapes are quaint and beautiful, And they have many pleasant colours and lustres To recommend them. Also the scent from them fills the room With sweetness of flowers and crushed grasses.
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All books are either dreams or swords, you can cut, or you can drug, with words.
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Moon! Moon! I am prone before you. Pity me,and drench me in loneliness.
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Youth condemns; maturity condones.
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I must be mad, or very tired, When the curve of a blue bay beyond a railroad track Is shrill and sweet to me like the sudden springing of a tune, And the sight of a white church above thin trees in a city square Amazes my eyes as though it were the Parthenon.
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Not a softness anywhere about me, Only whalebone and brocade.